Help me out here,
Even though I understand how wrong and evil it was for Jewish people to occupy and get the land they did in the way they did, I sometimes feel conflicted about the CONCEPT of having a place where you can create your own society, based on whatever the fuck you want, and keep everyone else the fuck out. I call that SELF-DETERMINATION.
What would SELF-DETERMINATION for Jewish people look like, without it being oppressive to non-Jewish people?
What would SELF-DETERMINATION for Black and African people look like, without us being forced to live with white people?
In other words, one of the things that BOTHERS ME a lot in various discussions is a white bourgeois mentality that seems to assume that all societies have to be cosmopolitan and integrated....One settler, one bullet. :-)
Art
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[Sorry about that other post under the same title--early morning cli use of mail is never a good idea---this is the intended post]
The answers varied, but ultimately I don't think you got a very clear one. Let me put it this way, I wasn't all that content with the answers in any event. I stewed around about this and found something in the book I am reading at the moment, James Charlton, Nothing about us without us, UCB press, 2000. Charlton quotes Manning Marable:
`` [DuBois, Robeson, Hamer, later Malcom X, ...]...have sought to deconstruct or destroy the ideological foundations, social categories, and institutional power of race. Transformationalists have sought neither incorporation or assimilution into the white mainstream, nor the static isolation of racial separation, but the restructuring of power relations and authority between groups and classes in such a manner as to make race potentially irrelevant as a social force....This critical approach to social change begins with a radical understanding of culture... Culture is both the result of and consequence of struggle; it is dynamic and ever changing, yet structured around collective memories and tradition... To transform race in U.S. life demands a dialectical approach toward culture which must simultaneously preserve and destroy. We must create the conditons for a vital and creative black cultural identity in the arts and literature, and in music and film...But we must also destroy and uproot the language and logic of inferiority and racial inequality (1995:89)..'' (158p)
To re-word this a little, I would say the trick is to keep the difference and get rid of its socio-economic determination as a dialectic of power and oppression. This goes for any group that is not identical with those in power---however those differences are configured---so it includes such diverse collections of people as those with various disabilities, or those of particular racial or ethnic identifications. This isn't ultimately an integrationist or assimulation theme since, the whole point is to retain whatever people have decided amoung themselves to cohere as their personal and collective identity---their fundamental social existance. The point is to destroy the configurations of power that have been put foreward to oppress them, because of that self-determined social existance.
Pursuing this further, notice that the desire to possess land for purpose of having a material space within which to exist as a social body is the very foundation of power relations of oppression. It is one thing to live on land, work it, build on it, enjoy it and share it (remember sharing?)---it is entirely another to possess it, lay sole claim to it. It is a very short step from there to claim individual ownership, and then you simply reproduce the grand swindle all over again.
So part of the struggle is to separate the socio-cultural configuration of people from our current concepts of exclusive power in state and capital, which once upon a time were founded exactly on the same disasterous mistakes of identifying the social body with its material location as a boundary of land.
It is obviously possible to inhabit a place without owning it, since most of us do all day everyday. And it is equally obvious, with some reflection, that there is nothing about the social body that demands a unique location.
These are not really answers either, but at least they seem to get out of some of the binds.
Chuck Grimes